John Cappellitti, Former Rams Running Back and Heisman Winner, is Burglarized

Get up on Uncle Matt's bum knee and let him tell you about the 1970s. Way back then, I swear the friggin' God, Los Angeles (and eventually Anaheim) had a professional football team. They were called the "Rams," and they played home games at the LA Coliseum (and eventually the Big A). For a time the Rams had a running back who seemed to hit linebackers as hard as they tried to hit him. His name was John Cappelletti, who won the Heisman Trophy in 1973 out of Penn State, which perhaps you've heard of lately.

John Cappelletti receives his Heisman.

Cappelletti, who did not win the starting job in the Rams backfield until 1976, never matched the promise he showed at Penn State, leaving LA in 1978 and finishing his pro career in San Diego in 1983. However, by then Cappelletti had crossed over into pop culture with the 1977 TV movie Something for Joey, which was about his relationship with his younger brother, who died of leukemia the year before. During his Heisman acceptance speech, John (who was played in the flick by Marc Singer) famously dedicated the award to Joey Cappelletti.

John Cappelletti retired to Laguna Niguel, where he and his wife Betty have raised four sons. On Tuesday, the Orange County Sheriff's Department reported that someone burglarized the Cappelletti home of about $50,000 worth of jewelry and sports memorabilia.

The Heisman Trophy was not among the items taken. Cappelletti previously donated that to Penn State's sports museum.

Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before "graduating" to OC Weekly in 1995 as the paper's first calendar editor. He has contributed as a freelance editor and writer to several publications and been the subject of or featured in several reports online, in print and on the radio and television. One of countless times he returned to his Costa Mesa, CA, home with a bounty of awards from a journalism competition, his wife told him to take out the trash.